Earlier, talking with a friend of mine about playing 40k boardgames with understanding ladies lead to a serious consideration about how euphemistically that language could be used in a more intimate sense. As in “Go, slow – I’m on overwatch here”.

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I watched this an hour before you posted it, which means I can read your minds, which probably means I read too much RPS. Watching his review of Chaos in the Old World while drunk resulted in an instant Amazon purchase, but I don’t think I’m sold this time. His declaration that the game “isn’t fun to play” had something to do with it, which again brings up the argument about whether games have to be “fun” to be worth playing.

I want to hear yours and Alec’s views on it, without having to resort to twitter. Can you tell us, please?

FFG tend to sell stuff on their site at a very large margin. The prices on Amazon and various specialist sellers tend to be much better…

Still, Horus Heresy is, as a board game, doesn’t look as convincing as Chaos In the Old World I have to say. The latter has been very very fun to play. Deliciously evil. Horus Heresy looks a little more… tame and bland perhaps?

Absolutely. God knows I haven’t spoken to many people having such a thick accent, and it took me two or three minutes to get into that. Good thing that he only talks about “casual board gamers” at the beginning.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve always liked the voice acting in the Dawn of War games. The characters sounding almost exclusively British and the Orks using British slang makes it feel natural to me.

Be they American or British, an effective way of destroying any immersion for me is using famous actors. Bethesda are terrible for it. I suppose it works the other way too though. The dad in Ugly Betty will always be Manny Calavera.

I will not complain about the current state of 40k canon. I will not complain about the current state of 40k canon. I will not complain about the current state of 40k canon. Despite the temptation to lament about how rubbish the current official version of the Heresy is compared to what it used to be, I will not.

Anyway, glad to hear it’s a good game, but I’m not really surprised; FFG make very good boardgames. Sadly, they’re attempting to turn WFRP into one, which isn’t a good thing. :(

You can’t complain about 40k canon because there is no 40k canon. Everything about the setting can change or alter at will. Nothing is set in stone and players are encouraged to change or play with the setting however they wish.

If you are trying to take everything that is published as canon you are kind of missing the entire point of the 40k setting. The whole point of the 40k background is to create a place where anything can happen, where nobody knows what is history and what is lies, where your allies are always suspect and your enemies are always heinous. There is no such thing as an official canon and bemoaning the state of a non-existant canon is a case of tilting at windmills if ever there was one.

ALEXANDER! I had to come in on this, on your “they’re turning WFRP into a boardgame” bit. I’m deep into a campaign with 3rd edition, and I must have gamesmastered about 15 sessions so far. 3rd Edition is NOTHING like a board game. In fact, it’s the most narrative roleplay heavy RPG you could ask for, outside Call of Cthulhu. Don’t let the chits and cards mislead you. They’re purely there so players can have all their rules in-hand and don’t need to reference books. I’ll have to write something up on the site about 3rd edition. It’s the best RPG I’ve played. The dice are an amazing innovation.

Thanks for checking out the video, folks. I’m trying to speak clearly!

To be entirely fair, I base my impressions of WFRP3 solely on a 15mn demo I got of it at an expo and what a few people I know online have said. I’ve not been able to get my hands on a copy of it mostly owing to being broke, its high price and its complete lack of availability where I am (France).

On a personal level, one of the things I dislike about boardgames in general and which does carry over to WFRP3 are the counters and cards. I’m not going to suggest they somehow “detract from the purity of the game” or anything silly like that, but one of the things I do love about WFRP and other dice-pool-based RPGs is that they require the smallest possible amount of setup/stuff to carry around. I can play WFRP2 with a piece of paper and a single d10, and on days where my brain is being particularly rubbish I might have to carry the core book with me. The rest I can just fudge midgame or design in 5-10mn before a session. Even D&D only requires a handful more dice and some more (admittedly a man-high stack of) books.

So yeah, I suppose my point is even though FFG might not be turning WFRP into a boardgame, mechanically speaking (regardless of the first impressions I got from that 15mn demo), it’s still ending up with all the clutter I associate with boardgames, thereby making it less appealing to me.

But yes, definitely please do a piece about WFRP3. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, in the absence of being able to give it a good whirl myself.

I’ve been making computer games for 15 years, and i’ve been playing card and boardgames for about the same time… I own about 50 board/card games in total. After watching this review, i get the feeling that this game would work better as a computer game than a board game.

Some games, such as Descent, Runebound, Arkham Horror, Tomb, War Of The Ring etc would just work so much better if all thr rules were computerised. Instead of each game taking 3+ hours, you’d have no setup, no checking the manual, no rules arguements and i reckon a game would be over in 1.5 hours, but you’d keep all the decision making.

Now that computer gaming exists, i don’t think there is an excuse for making a boardgame that is too complicated. i know what he means about facing off against someone though, perhaps we need a hybrid with the touch screen table someone demoed recently. You get the social aspect of boardgaming with the rules/setup taken care of automagically.

I dunno – some of the things I’ve especially championed has been of this model. Take Cryptic Comet’s games – Armageddon Empire is board-game-derived, but is of a design which wouldn’t work as an actual against-humans game. As in, there’s too much for all the players to do, and the waiting for the other to finish would kill it – without even getting into the heavy maths. Solium Infernum has a simpler design in terms of rules, but would still drag as a board-game, I suspect – there’s a lot of Math in there, putting aside the hefty complexity anyway.

But Gothnak – while Heresy is a complicated game, I’m not sure I’m not sure it’s one which really actually would speed up enormously – bar set up time – with the computer. It’s a game with virtually no maths in, for example – it’s all driven by choosing cards. What it does have is a series of oblique choices which means things can be a little counter-intuitive. It also pushes *back* its complexity – being card based means that while the rules which drive it are simple, the array of things which can happen inside the game isn’t – and you don’t really know what *could* happen until you’ve grasped all the cards.

For example, combat is basically fought in a number of rounds. Each round, you play cards from your hand. The hand is basically half the strength of your units, rounded up. So if you’re a force of 1 fighting 10, you get 1 card to their five. You take turns using cards or using cards to block. Your options are always strictly limited to what you have in your hand. It’s a very tight, limited set of decisions…

However, until you know what the enemy or you *could* have drawn, how to actually best play is illusive. It’s a very complex game, but not in a way which automation would help enormously.

Solium Infernum has a lot in common with Diplomacy though, a case of working out your turn and then them all occuring at the same time. Tbh, if you were all face to face i think it would work even better, but i understand some of the maths would be pretty dull if you had to work it out yourself!

Having Horus computerised would benefit it in the following ways:

Being able to think about turns for much longer is you were playing over email. Also not having to clear up the dining room table if it overruns!

Trying out moves and seeing the results without trying it just out in your head first. You’d be able to undo moves until you ‘submit’ them.

Also, having the relevant rules directly to hand. If you are playing a card i’m sure it can pop up text explaining what different ruling mean, or where it can be played or what units benefit from it etc. Reduces complexity greatly.

Finally, it means you don;t mess up the rules the first time you play. I know that i’ve done this far too many times to mention (Most Recently Marvel heroes where we got the mastermind rules wrong), which means the first play of anything is usually a test run.

One boardgame that WOULD be sped up immensely by having a computer version of it is the Doom boardgame. It’s remarkably good – kinda like a hybrid of Space Hulk and Hero Quest, but holy shit does it ever take ages to get all the map pieces out, set things up according to the campaign, lay bits down where the campaign book says, etc.

Gameplay is relatively fast once it is going, but just eliminating the entire setup time would improve things vastly. It’d also speed up moving from one mission to the next – something that’s painfully slow on the tabletop.

I can completely empathize with what you’re saying, but it’s a hard one for me. Just last night, I decided I felt like playing a spot of solo Arkham Horror – and 60 min later, I was ready to take my first turn. Another hour later and I’d sealed a single gate. Uggg. Part of my loves the *feel* of a boardgame, seeing it layed out before me in all its glory – and part of me wishes I could automatize the infuriatingly mundane aspects of it.

Side note: I played the Ipad version of Small World the other day and it was like an epiphany. Totally awesome. Not that Small World is a fantastic game, mind you (it’s good, but not great), but the Ipad opens up the world of computer-boardgames hybrids like nothing else before it, I think.

CCG inspired are Shandalar (MTG) and Etherlords. Is Panzer General: Allied Assault on PC yet? Also there are a lot of competrised versions of German boardgames available from the boardgame manufacturers. Like Settlers, El Grande, Carcassonne.

Finally, check out brettspielwelt which has tons of multiplayer boardgames to play for free, although not as polished as a full release.

This made me want to get out the original, but after climbing on my desk to get to my top cupboard I saw where it was and thought sod it.Persuading the Mrs that it’d be really fun to try would have been too much effort as it was.

I rather liked the space dorfs actually – got a squat biker on one of the local GW store’s give-away days. Thought it was the absolute dumbest thing ever until I someone pointed out I was fielded a harlequin army. That wee squat made it a proper circus!

… I guess that was just too much fun for the grim darkness of the future.

@Magic H8 Ball: I assume his point relates to GW declining to outline what exactly is canon and what is not; their attitude is more or less that official literature, Black Library novels, comics, FFG background etc are all equally valid, or at least that they all provide ‘a view’. According to GW there is usually not ‘THE view’.